Search Results

You are looking at
1
-
2
of
2
items for
:

Legacies, Trajectories, and Comparison in the Anthropology of Buddhism

Nicolas Sihlé and Patrice Ladwig

The anthropology of Buddhism may give the impression of already having a
well-established lineage. However, understood as a collective endeavor bringing together
specialists from different parts of the Buddhist world in a comparative spirit, it remains
very much an emerging project. We outline in this introduction some of the striking features
of the beginnings of this subfield, such as how it has undergone a process of emancipation
from textualist interpretations of Buddhism, and survey some of its main thematic
and analytic orientations, pointing in particular to its most substantial ‘long conversation’,
on the structure and dynamics of Buddhist religious fields. Throughout, we focus primarily
on the period following an assessment of the subfield made by David Gellner in 1990.
Finally, we stress the importance and highlight the promise of a comparative anthropology
of Buddhism that builds on a critical, reflexive examination of its central concepts.